A World Too Tidy

Eshara smelled of cut stems and rain, and that was the first thing Dr. Imran Sayer wrote in her field notebook, because a planet has no business smelling like a kept garden. She had surveyed eleven worlds with native vegetation and they all smelled of competition, of rot and pollen and the chemical warfare plants wage on each other for light. Eshara smelled of none of that. She walked the first transect alone, against protocol, and what she found was an ecosystem with no weeds. Every plant had room. The canopy species spaced themselves so that the understory got exactly the light it needed and no more. Root networks shared water with a generosity that should have been impossible, because generosity is not a thing evolution selects for, evolution selects for greed that survives. By the end of the first transect Imran had stopped taking samples and started simply looking, the way you look at a painting, and she understood that she had been sent here to catalogue something that someone had composed.